


The Dead Will Rest

by RubyRogue



Category: Doctor Who, World War Z (2013)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-08
Updated: 2017-07-22
Packaged: 2018-10-16 13:04:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10571889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RubyRogue/pseuds/RubyRogue
Summary: The Doctor is not a good man, or a bad man. He's not a hero or a villain. But he is patient. And with the rest of the world surging with undead and infection, patience was what it needed most.





	1. Run. Hide. Fight.

_**Disclaimer: I don't own Doctor Who and World War Z. I don't make a profit off my work here. I just do it for fun.** _

 

 

He could see the wear on Clara's face, the lines and shadows from too many sleepless nights when she stared at texts that he knew she didn't understand. She would take notes for him, as best she could. And he never stopped her, never corrected her. He had been too late to save Artie and Angie, he had been too late to save Danny, to save Clara's family...But he wasn't too late to save Earth. 

The plague had come from space. Wasn't that always how it was? Aliens would try again and again, throwing their full weight against the people The Doctor so loved. He would repel them. And on and on it would go. He was the reason Earth needed protection and its Savior. He had the benefit of time, though. The ability to see time and to shape it. He had the ability to wait or to attack. 

Fifty five years. It was a pitiful amount of time. The blink of a Timelord's eye. And the entirety of some human lives...He had shielded Clara from the worst of it, but she had endured horror beyond imaging. She had seen London fall twice. The second time was his fault. He forgot to account for the catacombs and the sheer number of infected they could hold. He didn't try to save London a third time. Jack was still in the streets. Immune to their bites and far too noble to give up on the scattered half dozen souls that might still remain, he stalked the streets. He tried to save Torchwood. He managed to save a few. In the United States, he had tried to stem the flow of infected--all resulting from one lone space vampire...the poor creature had been twisted into a biological weapon. The Doctor still didn't know by whom...He had failed. So he retreated to Cardiff. He took Clara with him. Sheltered her from the tide of undead and time. Sheltered her as best he could from the images and the sounds. The infected often ignored the TARDIS. Every so often one would fall into torpor against the side. He didn't let them linger for long. His hands were bloody. He did it to protect her. To protect her from their bite and from the terrible deed of dispatching them. 

"Today is the day, Clara." 

She looked up at him, cradling a cup of coffee he knew was cold. He didn't enjoy the beverage himself. Too dark, too bitter, it needed too much altering. Too much like life. He knew she found comfort in it long after tea had ceased to be an option. 

"What day?" 

"The day this changes. I want you to stay in the TARDIS. She'll keep you safe." 

"Will she let me watch, at least? It's too loud when you're away." 

The howls and the groans...she could hear them sometimes even inside the TARDIS. She never looked outside. She knew she would see too many of them. Too many too far gone. And she knew it would eat her if she didn't stop letting those images into her head. 

"She will. Don't leave the TARDIS. No matter what happens, Clara. Promise me." 

She nodded. She had no more words. 

Trauma had been his ally. No one questioned the installment of a new doctor with the CDC in Cardiff a mere six months before the disaster. No one questioned that he lived on site. They left his room, and his TARDIS, alone. They were too busy to care about meddling in his personal business. He preferred it that way. 

They were good people. Scared, but good. And they were turning their fear into productive measures. Or they had been...The catastrophe of B Wing had dampened even his hopes. He had wanted, desperately, to stop it. The waves of time were difficult to interpret most of the time. He had spent more years than their were words for to learn how. One thing, though, was always clear: a fixed point in time. Reading time was like reading a heart monitor, the ups and downs in various colored threads than ran through all people and things. Fixed points simply...stopped. No movement. No color. A void. He understood, as he watched the tragedy unfold on the monitor, that he could not change it. So he watched them in silent tribute. He memorized their faces. Someone had to. And he carried so many dead with him already. 

Their deaths would fuel the turning of the tide. When Gerry Lane appeared a few days later, injured and delirious, even he had doubts. 

How very human, he had mused, cleaning the nasty puncture in the man's side and wishing for the rapid healing of the TARDIS. This man couldn't know. Pain was what motivated him, kept him from being reckless. 

Humans... _his_ humans. It had been 3 days. Gerry would awaken that day. And, if the Doctor was right, would change the fate of humanity. 

 

TBC


	2. Run

**_ Chapter Two: Run. Hide. _**

**_ Disclaimer: I don't own Doctor Who or World War Z (the movie) and make no profit from my work here on Ao3. _ **

 

He had tried. If there were gods, they knew he had tried. The United States had been a lost cause, too embroiled in the idea that impossible things didn't happen. Israel had, and would continue, to manage. He had listened to Gerry in his delirium cry out for sanctuary, beg for forgiveness from Segen when she laid not five feet from him. He couldn't tell Gerry that Israel would rally. Humans were so fickle with their motivations. The knowledge that one place had managed to survive might discourage him from wading into the ocean of infected in B-wing.

"If I could," The Doctor told him as Gerry thrashed in the throes of his fever. "I would bear this burden for you."

The world hadn't been prepared to deal with the undead. They weren't ready to deal with the vastness of space and the horrors it held. Late at night, when the others slept, he would visit Clara. Sometimes he risked letting her out of the TARDIS to stretch her legs and see the sun. Time was meaningless otherwise. She had been safely tucked away for several days. He couldn't be sure when Gerry would wake. When the man did, he certainly didn't disappoint.

"Why do you keep looking at him?" The Doctor demanded softly when Gerry's eyes refused to leave the man behind him.

"Cause he's the one in charge."

The Doctor bit back a smile; he didn't enjoy being in charge. He did it to spare lives. Or at least that was the lie he told himself. If he was honest, he didn't believe that humans could. They had small brains and even smaller hearts. Gerry Lane seemed the exception. He had to be sure. So he had watched from a hallway while the creatures ripped apart a little boy's father. Just to see if Gerry would save this tiny little life that was too small to aid him and his own family in their survival. The Doctor put down Tomas's mother himself. The father he watched plunge to the ground below from behind a blood stained window. The Doctor sat down across from his supervisor as the man called Thierry Umutoni. He drank the bitter coffee that they had and wished for tea. He waited.

The Doctor was very good at waiting.

He had painstakingly worked his way through classes. He took as many as the universities would allow them. It still took him ten years to finish the classes, obtain a degree, and find a job within W.H.O. It took him another twenty to garner a position in Cardiff. He had blood on his hands. Dr. Fassbach would have lived if the Doctor hadn't taken his place. The brilliant young man had competed with him for a position within the organization. Instead, The Doctor accepted the position and Fassbach took a job with the army. And died in an underdeveloped pit of hell in the middle of a forest. The Doctor had watched it happen, just another misty figure in the rain. He fled after. And what he fled into was worse.

North Korea was suffering incarnate and given voice. He watched children scream as their teeth were yanked free with pliers and piled in bloody heaps. When the dead began to swarm in, every man, woman, and child armed themselves with rocks and bludgeoned the infected into the pavement. It wasn't enough. It was never enough. The dead still came, they still bit. The lack of teeth only delayed the inevitable. The Infected would bite hard enough to fracture bone. He made himself watch as the dead splintered the bones in their jaws into deadly needles. They bit. The infection spread.

The Doctor was not a good man. He could have set off the bombs that lay in the ground around North Korea. Ended the suffering. He didn't, though. He ran. He ran until his two hearts screamed at him in agony and he collapsed inside the TARDIS and Clara screamed his name. He clung to her like she was the last human alive, like she was the only thing to keep him from drowning. He wished for River. He wished for the silence of the Library. He wished for so many things. He wished for a different face and a different time. None of it would have mattered. Their faces haunted him.

B-Wing haunted him.

Such a stupid, human mistake. The slip of a needle with just a few drops of blood, just a few thousand particles of contaminant. It was enough. And it spread like wildfire. He memorized the names of each them. He memorized their families and which members would survive. In a not too distant future, he told himself, he would make it right. He would leave wedding rings beneath pillows and wallets of cash on top of bedspreads and favorite coffee cups in cupboards.

He helped them tape magazines around their arms. He thought about praying. But who listened to a Timelord? Who or what might be out in the vast dark miasma or space? He had seen the beginning and the end of all things. And never had he found the face of something he could call God. But others called _him_ a god. They worshipped his old faces and offered so many bizarre sacrifices to the idea of what he might have been. He was so lonely. He procured weapons for them. He made them coffee. He painstakingly drew Vault 139. He forgot to mention that the fatal contagions were kept in a separate box. He failed to tell Gerry that none of the vials would have a common name. They were all scientific jargon made more unintelligible by the numbers scrawled across them that designated the strain type, its host, its origin...

"Are you scared?" Clara asked him.

He stood in front of the monitor. He needed just a moment. Just a moment to sit before he sent them to what he knew could very well be their deaths.

"No."

He lied.

TBC

 

 


	3. Hide

_**Chapter 3: Hide** _

"Will it work?

He didn't know. Timelords knew how to read time; but like the tides, they ebbed and flowed and changed and were never as predictable as he wanted them to be.

"It has to."

He heard Clara's breath catch painfully in her throat and knew she was trying to swallow her tears. He wished, more than anything, that he could stay with her. He knew she needed him. But the world, all of Earth, needed him more.

"I'll make this right, Clara. I will."

He turned the monitor off. She didn't object. He asked if she wanted to stay. Clara turned away and walked wordlessly down the halls of the TARDIS. He wanted it that way. He wanted to hide her away from the horror and the blood. He wanted more than anything to protect her. He had failed to protect so many already. He pulled the lever. The TARDIS spun away. He was so very careful to close and lock the door behind him.

The dead ignored him. They would swarm right past him without so much as hesitating. He could swim through hordes of them. They never looked at him. And he never looked into their eyes. He had, once, by mistake. The suffering he saw was too much to bear. He had burned billions of people, set it all on fire. He couldn't bear to carry other's ghosts with them. He couldn't afford himself the luxury of pitying the creatures in front of them, of entertaining the thought that perhaps a person might still be cognizant and suffering beneath their infected, violent husks.

He peered around a corner and saw Segen shake her head. The hallway in front of them was little more than glass paneling and a lab of infected. One creature was rocking back and forth, making an awful noise. They did that, the Doctor had discovered, to keep themselves alert for longer. A mechanism to prevent them from entering their easily disturbed sleep. He shuddered at the malicious intelligent that seemed to have bred them. The perfect machines to kill, to infect, to bite and make another bleed. The perfect way to weaponized movement and teeth. He knew Segen didn't think they could make it.

He knew, in some timelines, that she was right.

But not this one.

He snuck around the broken glass, careful to watch the heel of his boot. The infected had broken through the wall. He crept up through it and behind the metal counters. He could hear Gerry's breathing, smell the good doctor's sweat, hear Segen's heart thrum harder in her chest. He waited for the gentle fall of knees on tile. He reached up against the counter with just his pinkie nail.

_Tap, tap, tap, tap._

He had tried and failed nineteen times. Nineteen times of watching them ripped apart, of wading through the blood, of going back to Clara. Nineteen times to perfect the rhythm and the pitch and the volume. Just enough to draw their attention away without sparking their blood thirst.

_Tap, tap, tap, tap._

Segen was through. The lead doctor, too. Just Gerry left.

This was where it had gone wrong the last time. He had tapped too hard one too many times. Gerry had died first, his throat ripped out. Segen saved two bullets. And when the dead overran them, she shot the good doctor first and then herself. The infected ate their corpses and, invigorated by the blood and guts, ruptures the fragile sky bridge and killed the doctors on the other side. This time, though, the monster swiveled its head the other way and Gerry crept by. The Doctor crawled away, brushing the glass away with his elbows and his knees, and then he raced down the hall.

He was too slow. He knew it by counting his breaths. He had been too slow. A red-headed infected screamed and charged them. He knew that Segen and the lead doctor would flee back down the hallway and that Gerry would lead the dead through the endless hallways. The Doctor ran the other direction. If, maybe if just the stupid, blind brilliance of humans held out, he could still help. He pushed past the dead that scrambled uselessly in hallways, unable to pinpoint the sound that so agitated them. Up the stairs. His sonic pounded in his hand as he raised it against the camera. It deadened the signal, convinced the particles of electricity to sit still for just a few moments, and then he opened the vault. Gerry made the mistake once of taking from the wrong bin. The Doctor switched the bins, dumped the Ebola and AIDS tubes into his vest. It was all he had time for. At the very least, at the absolute worst, if Gerry took a fatal dose, he didn't make the outbreak worse.

There had been one timeline where he had mixed Ebola with the viral metabolites already in his blood. The result was the literal end of the world. And the Doctor was running out of way to help. Twice, maybe three times more, he could interfere. Past that...he knew the timeline would collapse. He had been too careless, too arrogant the first dozen time. He had been far too sure of himself and now if he wasn't careful enough, the Earth would burn in a different way.

There was no time to think. He couldn't take all of the viral and bacterial compounds. It was too risky. If he broke one by accident...No, he shook his head, he was running out of time. He could feel the electricity start to creep back into the line. They would be expecting him back at the computer any moment. He had to get back to the TARDIS.

He stole away as Gerry's ragged breathing came rising from the stairs. The Doctor ran on swift feet, flung himself into the TARDIS, and made a stop by a dying sun to incinerate the tubes in his vest. Nothing broken. Nothing contaminated. The TARDIS spun away back to the room he regularly stowed it. Clara wasn't in the control room. He thanked whatever entity might be listening to his frantic thoughts, calmed his breathing, and picked up the cold mug of coffee she had left behind. The others wouldn't think to question why it was a different one than the one he had taken away with him before on the pretense of needing the bathroom. He saw Segen running back, the W.H.O. lead doctor racing behind her. The dead surging.

"They are coming back!" He howled.

The Doctor had tried. He had tried so many times to _just let them go_. He couldn't. He never could. He fled down the hall like a man chased by his demons. And he was...he was a man chased by the horrors of all his failures. Of all the people that he had let die.

He couldn't do it again. So he ripped away the debris that secured B-wing and ripped open the door and screamed at them to _RUN_. And when they cleared the door and he slammed it shut against the surging horror behind them he prayed for the strength of the Timelords to be with him. And he surged back against them and sealed that door with a metal bar. And then he fled again. Back to the TARDIS.

"Please, Doctor, where are you going?" Clara cried out, grabbing his lapels as he pushed down the lever in front of him.

"To save the world, Clara."

She let him go. She didn't beg. She didn't plead. She watched the TARDIS doors snap behind him and she sobbed.

The Doctor fled down the hallway clustered with dead on his hands and his knees so the cameras couldn't hope to see him. He made just enough noise to pull them away from the fragile door. His two hearts pounded in his chest. He had counted his breaths the whole way. Breath nine thousand...If he was right, his female W.H.O companion would be stealing away from the group. She would make a phone call, give Gerry the code. The dead were sufficiently distracted, he noted as he crawled away. They would leave the doors alone and shambled aimlessly amongst themselves. One more threat eliminated, one more horrid timeline avoided.

"Don't leave me! Not again!" Clara wailed as he raced back into the console room.

"I have to, Clara. One more time. Only one more! That will end this!"

She nodded at him, tears racing down her thin, pale cheeks. Her eyes were iron. Her soul was steel.

The doors opened, he walked out. The Doctor waited for them to notice him, waited for their attention to focus back on the screens, and he stole away again. Back into the TARDIS, back into the hell of B-wing. He silenced the cloister bells as best he could, sure that Gerry would be too distraught to notice them, and crept up against the wall of the vault. Gerry selected a vial. The Doctor gripped the sonic. Gentle, reassuring pulses.

_This one, Gerry. This one is the vial. Use this one. Don't pick up another._

Gerry bowed his head in distraught. But, the Doctor noted, he did not put down the vial. He watched Gerry scrawl a hasty note. And then he watched Gerry insert the tip of a syringe into the vial. He watched Gerry inject the clear mixture into his arm. The Doctor waited. He counted minutes. Some compounds didn't work. They had never tried this one before...When Gerry finally woke to the thump of an infected scientist's body against the vault, the Doctor had just walked back into the room where his companions waited so fixed in terror and awe and hope and panic that they didn't see him slip back between them to sit down.

Gerry opened the door. The Doctor didn't breathe. His hearts pounded painfully against his chest.

The horrid caricature of a man snarled at him, teeth clicking, and pushed right past him.

 "He walked right past him..." The Doctor didn't even realize he had been speaking...not until he realized there were tears in his eyes.

The day played like a movie before him. Gerry drank his Pepsi, pulled the lever, cleared the dead from the doorway, and stepped through the doors clutching a box of viral and bacterial serums. Scene by scene. Play by play...until they had barred the door again and the Doctor was running and crying and carrying Clara to the ground with him when he flung himself at her. She cried then, too, happy sobs that shook them both. He felt his hearts beat against hers.

_Thu-thump. Thu-thump._

"You did it. You really did it. You bloody brilliant alien!"

He sobbed into her throat. The TARDIS cloister bells rang.

 TBC

 


	4. Fight

_**Chapter Four: Fight** _

 "What do we do now?" Clara asked.

"We save the world. All of it."

"How?"

"By fighting back, Clara."

Her hand closed over his. They pulled the lever together. And Clara laughed when the TARDIS spun away and the Doctor flung the door open. He threw himself through the open doorway of his brilliant machine, his left hand closed on her doorframe, and snatched from the air around them a falling box. He yanked it inside, laughing joyously.

"What is it?"

"The serum, Clara. The answer!"

He ripped open the bin and pulled a syringe from the packing. She presented her arm wordlessly. He slipped the needle through her skin, pushed the plunger, and removed it.

"What will we do with the rest?"

"I already told you, Clara: We save the world!"

He piled his jacket and she stocked her pockets. They were wraiths through time and space. The Doctor found people wherever he could. Cloistered in apartments, hidden in underground passages, huddled in terror in parks and cities. He found the young and the strong, the old and the weak. He gave them syringes, told them how to use it, brought food and water and medicine. He saved infants and children, turned boys and girls into warriors. He armed them. He taught them how to aim for the head, how to organize themselves. He thanked Martha for the martial prowess she had instilled in a almost forgotten form he had one day inhabited. He thanked Donna for teaching him how to tell fate to shove off. He thanked Rose for teaching him to love again. He thanked Mickey for teaching him that courage could be grown. He thanked River Song for never giving up on the heart and soul she saw in him even when he couldn't see it. And then he thanked Clara for being his constant companion. Through all of time and all of space.

"How many more?" Clara asked, hauling bins of water onto the TARDIS, her shoulders aching with the weight of canned provisions in her backpack.

"Thousands. Maybe more."

He stared at an unopened crate of syringes.

"Then we had best hurry along."

END

 

 


End file.
